Sommers is a a very fascinating example of someone who has not herself written a long book about the situation of women in Islamic countries. She found it more important to write books intended at destroying feminism so that there would then be nobody at all to help those women.

Here’s even more from Garance Franke-Ruta. I’ll also note for the record that when I took a women’s studies class in college, the professor — about as much of an out-of-touch academic cultural theorist as you’ll ever find — Afsaneh Najmabadi was an Iranian woman who, not surprisingly, had noted that Islamist regimes tend to implement woman-unfriendly policies. But, of course, this still came down to the fact that one can’t straightforwardly read conclusions like “we should bomb Iran” or “we should sanction Syria” or “we should back an Ethiopian effort to overthrow the de facto government of Somalia” off the reality that “many women in Muslim countries are treated poorly.” The alternative proffered by professional anti-feminists like Sommers — that American feminists should blindly back Republican Party foreign policy — isn’t even a remotely serious effort to grapple with the legitimately difficult question of how people in the west can engage constructively with these issues.